Activity watching

Up until a few days the only way to stay updated on new activities across many projects was to either subscribe to a bunch of atom feeds or visit each projects overview page regularly. But that’s no fun.

A few days ago we introduced a little star button next to repositories and merge requests. Clicking this subscribe you do new activities for that repository or merge request. Your new dashboard page will then list new activities in your own personal news feed, as well as list everything you’re watching making it easier to both find interesting projects and stay updated on them. Your dashboard is the new default page when you visit gitorious and you’re logged in, but you can still see the global activities

Now, on the subject of email notifications. This is one of those things that sounds simple but brings up all kinds of little issues when start implementing it and looking at use-cases. For instance on a large active project, not everyone who’s a committer may be interesting in receiving emails about new merge requests, and if you send them a lot of email (since it may be a very active project) they’ll quickly loose their patience and filter them out of their inbox.

So we’re making things more opt-in when it comes to email notifications, currently you can select per watched item whether you’d like to receive email or not when there’s new activity. All your repositories and merge requests are already in your watch list and any new ones you create will be placed there as well.

Further down the road we’ll be looking at more fine-grained email notifications and bringing you even more relevant things on your dashboard.

Gabriel,
We have plans to implement support for web hooks that will be invoked when commits are pushed to a repository. This way we can support integration with both continuous integration tools, bug trackers, microblogs and any other cool things you guys can come up with.

Am I crazy or is there no link to this “favorites” page anywhere? Similarly, I can opt-in or -out at the project or repository level, but nothing more granular. What notifications are included in each? I see nothing specific to merge requests.